Personhood: What a Human Being Is Made Of

A human being in Yoruba thought is a composite. The physical body is made by one agency, animated by another, and individuated by a third, and the sources add further elements which the scholars disagree about. Nothing in the list corresponds to the Christian soul: not a single immaterial substance that is the real you, that carries your moral record, that survives death intact and faces judgement. Trying to find that item in the Yoruba inventory is the standard error, and every element gets distorted in the attempt.

The elements

Ara, the body. Ara covers the whole physical constitution, external and internal, not just the frame. Brain, heart, intestines and organs are ara 1. In the creation account ara is moulded by Ọbàtálá, also called Ọ̀rìṣà-ńlá, who is the artisan of the human form and who is credited in the tradition with the making of those born with unusual bodies, who are consequently under his protection rather than under any stigma.

Ara is not the prison of anything and not the lower part of a person. Yoruba thought contains no asceticism and no doctrine that the physical is a fall from the spiritual. Gbadegesin notes that the Yoruba reproach to a selfish person is that their view stops at their ara: the criticism is not that they attend to the body but that they stop there, ignoring what they are as ẹ̀nìyàn 2.

Ẹ̀mí, the animating principle. An immaterial element that provides the animating force or energy without which a person is not living at all 1. Idowu associates it closely with the breath and with the whole mechanism of breathing, which is its most expressive manifestation 13. It is supplied by Ọlọ́dùmarè directly and by no one else, and its presence or absence is the difference between life and death 1.

The critical point about ẹ̀mí, and the reason it is not the soul: it is common to everyone and it does not individuate. Gbadegesin's argument is that because ẹ̀mí is the same active life force in every person, it cannot be the basis on which a person is identified as this particular self; that role belongs to orí 24. Ẹ̀mí is what makes you alive. It is not what makes you you.

Orí, the inner head. The element responsible for individuality, personality and destiny, treated in full in its own file. Orí is the individuating element and it is also a divinity 1.

Ọkàn, the heart. Both the physical organ and the seat of a kind of intuitive cogitation close to the English will: as the physical heart coordinates the body by pumping, ọkàn coordinates and motivates the parts of a person, directing them toward a purpose and sustaining them against resistance 4. Ọkàn is also where emotion and thought are located in ordinary Yoruba idiom, in the way that English idiom puts thought in the head and feeling in the heart. Gbadegesin includes ọkàn among the constituents of a person; Hallen and Sodipo's account from the onísègùn gives only three, ara, ẹ̀mí and orí 12.

Òjìji, the shadow. Understood as a component of the person with a real but far less active role in sustaining the self. Accounts vary by region and tradition. It can remain on earth after the death of ara and may take material form, but it requires the continued presence of ẹ̀mí in order to speak, and some hold that it does no more than mark the presence of ẹ̀mí in ara 4. Confidence: medium, because the regional variation is genuine and no single account is authoritative.

Ẹsẹ, the leg. Kola Abimbola adds this as a fourth element beyond Hallen and Sodipo's three. Literally leg, in the context of personhood it means strife, hard work, struggle, and it introduces the principle that the potential in one's orí must be actualised by individual effort 15. As a symbol of power, mobility and activity it is a vital part of human personality in both the physical and spiritual senses 1.

The scholars disagree, and the disagreement is informative

There is no agreed inventory, and the differences are not merely terminological.

Hallen and Sodipo report three elements from the onísègùn: ara, ẹ̀mí, orí 16. Their authority is that they asked practitioners and recorded the answers rather than systematising from published sources.

Idowu gives ara, ẹ̀mí and orí with a developed account of ẹ̀mí as breath, within a frame that treats ẹ̀mí in ways that invite comparison with the Christian soul 3.

Gbadegesin gives ara, ọkàn, ẹ̀mí and orí 2.

Kola Abimbola adds ẹsẹ, making four 5.

Various sources add òjìji 4.

Two conclusions follow. First, there is no Yoruba catechism. This is an oral tradition of practice and reflection carried by lineages, priesthoods and philosophers, with regional variation and no synod to standardise it, and the disagreement among modern scholars partly reflects genuine variation in the tradition and partly reflects the different questions each scholar was asking. A source that presents a single definitive list of the parts of a person is smoothing.

Second, the disagreements cluster around exactly the elements that a Christian or Cartesian frame would need. Everyone agrees on ara and ẹ̀mí and orí, which are the elements the tradition uses constantly in practice. The contested additions, ọkàn, òjìji, ẹsẹ, are the ones that would be needed to build something that behaves like a soul, a will or a moral agent in the European sense. That pattern suggests the tradition was not organised around answering the questions those categories were invented to answer.

Why "soul" does not fit

The Christian soul, as a Yoruba reader raised in the church will have received it, has a specific profile. It is single. It is immaterial. It is the true self, so that the body is a container. It carries moral responsibility and is the subject of judgement. It survives death intact and its post-mortem condition is determined by the life lived and the faith held. It is created individually by God at conception.

Test the Yoruba elements against that profile.

Ẹ̀mí is immaterial and comes from Ọlọ́dùmarè, so two features match. But it is not the true self, because it does not individuate; it does not carry a moral record; and it is not the subject of judgement, because there is no judgement.

Orí is the individuating element and it survives, so it looks closer. But orí is a divinity in its own right, which the soul is not; it carries destiny rather than moral desert; it is chosen or received rather than created for you; and on Balogun's argument it concerns material fortune and not moral character at all 1.

Ọkàn is the seat of will and intention, which is where moral agency would live, but it is also the physical organ and it is not what survives.

Òjìji survives in some accounts but is the least active element and cannot even speak without ẹ̀mí.

No element is the soul, and no combination is either, because the profile requires unification and the Yoruba account distributes the functions deliberately. What survives is not what individuates is not what wills is not what carries destiny. Segmentation is the design.

The most common error in the literature, and it appears in Idowu and in much of what followed, is to translate ẹ̀mí as soul and then to read the whole Yoruba anthropology through that translation. Once ẹ̀mí is the soul, ara becomes the body it inhabits, orí becomes something like a guardian angel, and the system has been quietly rebuilt as Christian anthropology with local vocabulary. Watch for it. The translation is not innocent.

Ẹ̀nìyàn: person as a normative term

Ẹ̀nìyàn is the Yoruba word for a human being, and Gbadegesin's contribution is to show that it has both an ordinary descriptive sense and a normative one 27.

Descriptively, an ẹ̀nìyàn is a member of the species. Normatively, ẹ̀nìyàn names what a human being ought to be, so that it is intelligible in Yoruba to say of someone that they are not ẹ̀nìyàn, meaning not that they are not biologically human but that they have failed at being a person. The normative concept develops out of how a person stands in relation to other living beings and what role they occupy among other people 2.

This is where Yoruba personhood is communal without ceasing to be individual. Orí makes you irreducibly a particular individual with a portion nobody else has, and no community can override it. Ẹ̀nìyàn in the normative sense is something achieved in relation to others and assessed by them. The tradition holds both, and readers who have encountered the general claim that African thought subordinates the individual to the community should notice that the Yoruba case does not support it in that form. Orí is as strong a doctrine of individual uniqueness as any tradition has.

Death, ancestors, and what continuity means

Death is departure rather than annihilation. The person goes to ọ̀run, and in the standard case to ọ̀run bàbá ẹni, the ọ̀run of one's own fathers, among one's own dead.

Becoming an ancestor is not automatic. The sources are consistent that it is available to those who lived to a good age and lived well, which in practice means dying old, having children who survive to bury you, and not having died in one of the ways that mark a death as irregular 8. A person who dies young, childless, or by certain deaths does not enter ancestorhood in the ordinary way.

Ancestors are not distant. They are addressed, fed, consulted, and appear in egúngún masquerade. What is claimed is participation, not remembrance: the ancestors are parties to the life of the lineage, and neglect of them has consequences that show up as misfortune requiring diagnosis.

The category is also not universal in the way "the dead" is. Your ancestors are yours, of your lineage, and are addressed by name and by oríkì. Yoruba ancestor practice is genealogically specific, and this is one reason the nineteenth-century wars and the Atlantic trade were so destructive to it: a person cut from their lineage compound loses access to the institution.

Àtúnwá

Àtúnwá names rebirth. The word breaks as àtúnwá, from tún, again, and wá, to come, so it is literally coming again 8. The sources also give àtúnwáyé, returning to the world, and distinguish forms within it including ìpadàwáyé, the ancestor's rebirth, àkúdàáyá, to die and reappear, and àbíkú 8.

The central claim, and the point that has to be gripped, is that Yoruba rebirth is partial and does not require the ancestor to have gone anywhere. The descendant in whom an ancestor returns has the ramification of the ancestor's ọkàn, the aspect that carries characteristic features, not the whole person 8. This is why the same ancestor can be recognised in more than one descendant and why the ancestor continues to be addressed as an ancestor after the birth of the child said to be their return. Both are true simultaneously, and on a transmigration model they could not be.

Recognition is made by resemblance, by dream, and by divination, and it is registered in naming 8. Bàbátúndé, father has returned; Yétúndé or Yèyétúndé, mother has returned; Ìyábọ̀, mother has come.

Call this reincarnation and you import the wrong model. In the Indic traditions rebirth is a single continuous self transferring to a new body, driven by karma, across species and lineages, and the aim is to stop. In the Yoruba case the return is within the lineage, it is partial, it does not empty the ancestral state, there is no moral ledger driving it, and nothing about it is regarded as a problem to be escaped. Returning is good news. There is no Yoruba doctrine of release from the cycle, because the cycle is not a trap.

Àbíkú

Àbíkú names the child who is born to die: à-bí-kú, one who is born and dies, or born to die, from bí, to give birth, and ikú, death 9. The phenomenon named is a woman losing successive infants, understood as the same child arriving and departing repeatedly.

What the tradition says. The àbíkú belongs to a company of spirit children in ọ̀run and has made a pact with them to return at an appointed time. The word often used of these spirit companions is ẹmẹrẹ, described as wandering spirits of children who enter pregnancies and are born only to die 9. Practice is directed at breaking the pact or making departure unattractive: divination to identify the case, names given to the child that plead or bargain or insult, Málọmọ́, do not go again, Kòsọ́kọ́, there is no hoe to dig a grave, Dúrójayé, stay and enjoy life, Ìgbẹ́kọ̀yí, and marking of the body, so that the returning child can be identified by the mark.

What historians and clinicians document. Yoruba infant and child mortality before the twentieth century was very high, and sickle cell disease is present at significant frequency in West African populations and produces exactly the observed pattern of a child who appears healthy at birth, becomes ill repeatedly and dies in early childhood, recurring among siblings because the inheritance is recessive. The clinical literature discusses àbíkú and the Igbo ogbanje as culture-bound framings of childhood mortality and, in some cases, of psychopathology 9.

How to hold these together without either sensationalism or dismissal. The two accounts are answering different questions. Sickle cell explains why the children died. It does not tell a mother in 1870 with four small graves what has happened to her or what she may do, and the àbíkú framework does. It supplies an explanation, a course of action, a name, and a way to speak to the child, which is not nothing and is arguably more than the mortality statistics offer. It should also be said plainly that the framework had costs, since it located the trouble in the child and in some tellings in the mother, and the literature on the scandal attaching to bereaved mothers documents that 9. Both the consolation and the cost are part of the record.

The reader should also notice what the àbíkú material shows about the cosmology. A child who moves repeatedly between ọ̀run and ayé, who has companions there, who can be bargained with, and whose body can be marked in one domain and recognised in the other, is only conceivable in a cosmos where the two domains are joined and permeable. Àbíkú is the orun-and-ayé structure applied to the hardest case in human life.